A file photo released on Sunday, May 17, 2015, by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows the general view of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. When Islamic State fighters routed Syrian government forces and took control of the ruins of Palmyra Thursday, May 21, 2015, the ancient city became the latest archaeological heritage site to fall into the hands of the militant group.

A file photo released on Sunday, May 17, 2015, by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows the general view of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. When Islamic State fighters routed Syrian government forces and took control of the ruins of Palmyra Thursday, May 21, 2015, the ancient city became the latest archaeological heritage site to fall into the hands of the militant group.
Photo Credit: SANA via AP

Palmyra a tragic loss to the world: ROM Archaeologist

Professor Clemens Reichel is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, and Associate Curator at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto.

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Like many in the global archaeological community, he is anguished by what is transpiring in Syria at the hands of ISIS.  He is troubled by the simple dichotomy of the value of a world heritage site compared to the value of a human life. The answer is obvious, but the question is troubling.

For Clemens Reichel, who has visited Palmyra many times, the site’s value is beyond monetary; “It’s actually our identity as humans that is created by through our past.”

He explains: “We can fight for oil fields, we can fight for strategic points, we can even die for flags and things like that, but somehow the protection of a cultural heritage site suddenly gets trivialized and it’s not worth fighting for and not worth protecting, so yeah there is deep anger about that in the archaeological community that the loss of a site like Palmyra can be so trivialized.”

“It’s actually our identity as humans that is created by through our past.”

When asked about the growing trend of this destruction, from the Buddas at Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001, he says that even sites of major Islamic heritage are not safe now.

“What is new with ISIS, and I think this is what startled us all the most, is that their “barbaric nihilism”, as a colleague of mine has called it very appropriately, does not stop with Islamic monuments, in fact one of the biggest trails of destruction has been with Islamic monuments. The most famous one is probably the so-called ‘Tomb of Jonah’ in Mosul, a major site of pilgrimage connected with the biblical prophet of Jonah, and countless shrines in northern Iraq of Islamic heritage have been blown apart. Obviously many Christian churches have been destroyed and it was actually, it took a while, it took almost six months until they really started going after archaeological sites and they have done so with a vengeance since then.”

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